Objection-reply: Whether OA-promoting policies must "wait until the infrastructure is ready"

There are large reasons to launch open-access journals and archives. But here's a smaller one that might be overlooked in the discussion of the larger ones.

Some institutions that support OA are torn by the decision whether to go beyond encouraging it to requiring it. For example:

* Funding agencies might want to require OA to the results of the research they fund.

* Legislatures might want to require OA to the results of the research funded by taxpayers.

* Universities might want to require that faculty (especially those undergoing promotion and tenure review) deposit their research articles in the institution's OA repository or archive.

I've been in several conversations with funders and university administrators who are considering these steps. One objection that always comes up is that the OA infrastructure isn't ready. "We can't require OA," the argument goes, "or even encourage it very strongly until the OA infrastructure can accommodate the resulting flood of literature."

In responding to this objection, let's first distinguish the archive infrastructure from the journal infrastructure.

The archive infrastructure is either ready or very close. There's ample unused capacity, and archives scale up without problem. But even if there aren't enough archives to hold *all* the literature that would flow toward them if governments, foundations, and universities began to require OA, they are inexpensive and easy to launch. If major institutions adopted policies encouraging or requiring deposit in an OA archive, you can be sure that more than enough universities, libraries, labs, departments, and private researchers would launch new archives before the week was over.

Moreover, funding agencies should appreciate that they can host their own archives. Last month, for example, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched its own archive, Science Inventory, to hold EPA-funded data and research papers. Even if all these files could be archived in various institutional and disciplinary repositories outside the EPA, using its own archive lets EPA monitor compliance with its OA requirement, facilitate discovery and retrieval, assure long-term preservation, and of course guarantee the sufficiency of the infrastructure.

The journal infrastructure is different. When foundations and legislatures worry about insufficient infrastructure, they're really worrying about OA journals. This is clear from their conversation. It's important to respond to this worry about journals with two very different considerations.

First, it's true that there aren't enough OA journals. We should have many more in every discipline. All OA proponents admit this.

Second, it would be a mistake for a funding agency to require OA through journals alone. If it wrote its policy properly, it would require OA, period, and leave the researcher some choice about how to achieve it --in particular the choice between archives and journals. OA through archives is just as useful and just as genuine as OA through journals. OA archives could take the flood of new OA literature without delay. Archives could continue to fill this role even after we have many more OA journals.

Bottom line: the OA infrastructure *is* ready. We realize this as soon as we remember that OA isn't limited to journals.

Some funding agencies and universities will never be comfortable requiring OA. But my distinct impression is that some would go beyond encouragement to requirement if they believed that the OA infrastructure was ready to accommodate the resulting surge of articles. I invite these institutions see that the infrastructure is ready, to cross that objection off the list, and continue their deliberations where they left off.

Sometimes infrastructure leads content, and we must work on getting people to submit their content and take advantage of the existing capacity. This is roughly the situation today with archives. But sometimes content leads infrastructure, and we hope it will nudge or inspire people to create infrastructure. This is roughly the situation today with journals. The motive force may shift back and forth, just as software makes demands on hardware, which manufacturers eventually satisfy, and hardware creates opportunities for software, which programmers eventually exploit. We can ride this dialectic by pushing more content into existing archives, and launching more journals to take up the building demand. The first step will answer the objection that scholars show little interest in OA. The second step will answer the objection that the journal-infrastructure isn't ready.

There are many unfilled archives today. So I know better than to claim that "if you build it, they will come." Infrastructure alone is insufficient. We need infrastructure plus policies (from funders and employers) to encourage its use, and we need education (from friends of OA) to show why using it is in the interests of scholars themselves, both as authors and readers.

But for the same reason --there are many unfilled archives today-- no one can say that the OA infrastructure isn't ready for a big bump in demand.

* I've drafted a model policy for funding agencies showing one way to require OA to the results of the funded research by giving the researcher the choice between OA archives and journals. This or some variation on this method lets funding agencies require OA now, without waiting for a huge wave of new journals to launch. It also allows authors to meet the OA requirement without giving up their freedom to publish in conventional, toll-access journals. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/foundations.htm

In November, I was in Croatia speaking on OA and talking about OA issues with scholars, librarians, and government officials. In preparing for my talk, I learned that some Croatian scholars are paid for their journal articles and some are not. After I arrived, I learned that Croatian journals typically pay for articles in law, economics, agriculture, and the humanities, and typically do not pay in medicine and the natural sciences.

In most countries and most disciplines, scholarly journals never pay authors for journal articles. In the countries where the OA movement arose, OA to journal articles is compelling in part because authors are giving them away and looking for ways to disseminate them to the widest possible audience. We stop short of calling for OA to books partly because authors can earn royalties from their books. OA is about giving readers barrier-free access to what authors are giving away, not about taking from authors what they are not giving away. OA works best when it requires no sacrifice from authors that they are not already making.

So how do we advocate OA for journal articles in countries and disciplines where authors are paid for them?

Fortunately, in Croatia a second scholarly tradition offsets the tradition of paying authors and makes this question easy to answer. Authors of journal articles typically retain copyright.

If an author is paid for her article and also retains the copyright to it, then she can let a conventional journal publish it and then deposit the postprint in an OA archive. She has the best of both worlds --payment and permission. She also has the freedom to publish in conventional journals without giving up the possibility of OA.

So far, postprint archiving is rare in Croatia, but that is changing. It's possible that as this practice grows, journals will reconsider the tradition of paying authors for articles or the tradition of leaving copyright in the author's hands. It's too early to tell.

What about countries that pay authors for journal articles but also ask authors to transfer copyright? (Are there such countries? I don't know of any, but I can try to answer in the abstract.) Authors in these countries are still free to deposit their preprints in OA archives, since that requires no permission from the publisher. But postprint archiving will be more difficult. OA journals might exist, but the processing fee might be neutralized by the author payment. Does that mean that authors would neither pay nor be paid and still have an open-access publication? If so, most scholarly authors would jump at that deal.

Even when journals don't pay authors, they have other expenses. Hence, they still need a revenue stream or subsidy. If they pay authors, then the revenue stream or subsidy must simply be a little larger. So the custom of paying authors doesn't break the logic of OA; it merely increases the degree of difficulty.

The chief danger where journals pay authors is (1) that the payments are large enough to matter and (2) that journals will stop paying authors who provide OA to their articles. Where these conditions hold, scholarly authors will lose their distinctive immunity to markets and suddenly have the same interests as musicians and novelists. The size of their payment may not depend on the popularity of their work, but its existence will depend on limiting access to paying customers.

* Postscript. I understand that in Russia scholars are also paid for their journal articles, at least in some fields. I'd be interested to hear from readers about other countries and disciplines where this tradition is followed, and how those countries and disciplines are accommodating the growing demand for open access.

* Many people helped me understand the Croatian tradition of paying some scholars for their journal articles and not others. But I'd especially like to thank Zorana Gajic, Omer Hadziselimovic, and Iva Melinscak Zlodi.

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Advice to a student

Last month I received a letter from Michael Long, a philosophy major at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. I reproduce it here with his permission.

I am an undergraduate philosophy student, interested in entering a doctoral program in philosophy. I understand that you are a serious advocate of open access to academic scholarship, and so I think you might be able to give me some advice. I oppose almost all intellectual property rights, and to legally restrict or to allow anyone else to legally restrict access to any writings I produce would violate my ethical standards. At the same time, I understand that it is very important for a scholar to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Are there any philosophy journals that do not demand an exclusive copyright and yet are prestigious enough that I might establish a reputation while only publishing in them? Can you imagine any way in which I might succeed in this field without compromising my integrity?

I wrote Michael a reply that drew in part on our common field, philosophy. But here let me generalize for undergraduate and graduate students from all fields who might be planning an academic career that combines open access with career advancement. How can you have both?

(1) First, the narrow question about journals that don't demand copyright and yet have enough prestige to help your career must be answered differently in different fields. Even for experienced scholars, the question will be difficult, since the answer depends on the copyright policies of each of the first-rate journals in the field, and most scholars don't know most of those policies.

I recommend the Project RoMEO table of journal policies on copyright and self-archiving. There's no substitute for reading a given journal's submission requirements and publishing contract. But this table gives the basic policies of the major journal publishers.http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/

(2) The best way to provide open access to your work is to cooperate with the copyright system to some extent. When you write an article, you are the copyright holder and you should use your rights intelligently to get the result you want. You can waive all these rights and put the work into the public domain. Or you can waive most of these rights, provide open access to the article, and retain just the rights (for example) to block the distribution of mangled and misattributed copies. Either way, you get these results by using the power that the law gives to copyright holders. It's true that you could get the same results if the law gave less power to copyright holders, and I want to get there as much as anyone. But in the meantime, copyright law is only a problem when the copyright is held by someone who wants to restrict access.

(3) While most journals will ask you to transfer copyright, some will accommodate you if you refuse or if you want to negotiate. Nobody really knows how many journals will be flexible this way, since journals don't advertise their willingness to negotiate. Anecdotally, we know that some are willing and some are not. So the lesson is to try. If you try to retain copyright, you'll succeed more often than you thought, even if that's not often enough. Moreover, if more and more authors try, then more and more journals will feel pressure to shift their policies

(4) There are still things you can do if the journal wants a substantial bundle of rights. You can transfer most rights to the journal but retain the right to put the postprint (the version that was approved by the peer-review process) in an OA archive or web site. Or, you can offer to transfer to the journal just the right of first print and electronic publication. Many journals think that's enough.

(5) If there are OA archives hosted by your institution or discipline, then you can deposit your preprints there, regardless where you publish the postprints. A growing number of publishers will let authors deposit their postprints in these archives as well. That gives you open access without limiting your freedom about where to publish.

(6) All the while, of course, you can work to create more OA options in your field --primarily, journals and archives. Then they'll be there when you need them.

(7) Conference presentations are usually OA. Make a name for yourself by presenting your work at conferences. Over time, can you wangle invitations to increasingly prestigious conferences. You can then either publish the results in OA journals (no matter what their degree of prestige), directly to the web, or in books.

(8) A related strategy is to make your name through books. It's customary for book authors to retain copyright, the reverse of the situation for journal articles. On the other hand, it's rare for book publishers to provide OA to full-text books, although it's now being done for a growing number of titles at California, Illinois, Columbia, MIT, and the Brookings Institute, and since 1994 it's been done for all the titles at the National Academy Press. If you have important books to your name, it may matter less whether your articles are OA in less prestigious journals or even non-OA. Note that this strategy will work better in the humanities than the sciences, and that there is a "monograph crisis" in the humanities making it increasingly difficult there as well. As the prices of science journals rise into the stratosphere, libraries cope in part by cutting into their book budgets, which leads university presses to accept fewer book manuscripts.

(9) Your preferences won't be the only ones that matter here. If you become a university professor, your publishing decisions will be influenced by the criteria of the committee that decides your hiring, promotion, and tenure. This committee may not respect the OA journals on your list and may expect a very conventional kind of publishing career with traditional journals. However, even when this is the case, you can still deposit your preprints in OA archives, and often your postprints as well. Beyond that, I can recommend that you push for changes now so that the situation will improve for your successors. That means work to create high-quality OA journals, work to close the gap between an OA journal's quality and its prestige (so that the good ones are both good and prestigious), and work to make the criteria used by promotion and tenure committees more sensitive to changing circumstances.

(10) Finally, educate your peers and professors about open access --and one day, your students. Don't let misunderstandings circulate without challenge. Don't let another generation of scientists and scholars become publishing authors ignorant of the profound changes that have taken place in making research literature useful and accessible. Swap tips with your friends and spread the word. Your success in relying on OA journals and archives depends on a community of like-minded scholars who build, maintain, edit, and submit their work to these resources. It will take more than a village. One cause and one effect of your activism should be the community that will build the superior publishing model of the future.

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Coming up later this month

Here are some important OA-related events coming up in December

* On December 10-12, 2003, World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) will finally take place in Geneva.http://www.geneva2003.org/

The Scientific Information Working Group has been the main locus of effort to write meaningful endorsements of open access into the final WSIS documents. The working group is very ably chaired by Francis Muget. (Disclosure: I'm on the steering committee for this working group.)http://www.wsis-si.org/si-frame.html

The documents most relevant to open access are the Principles and Plan of Action of the Scientific Information Working Group. Here are the latest drafts:

For some background on why open access may be mentioned in the final documents less prominently than you'd like, and less prominently than it was in earlier drafts, see Francis Muguet's Activity Report of October 24, 2003.http://www.wsis-si.org/si-prepcom3-report.html

* On December 31, 2003, the ERIC clearinghouses will either go offline or continue without ERIC funding.

Information and Access: improving communication between publishers and academic users (sponsored by BIC, NISO, and the PA) http://www.bic.org.uk/bicniso03.pdf
London, December 4, 2003

The role of science in the information society (sponsored by CERN, UNESCO, the International Council for Science, and the Third World Academy of Sciences) http://rsis.web.cern.ch/rsis/index.html
Geneva, December 8-9, 2003

A selection of open-access developments since the last issue of the newsletter, taken from the Open Access News blog, which I write with other contributors and update daily. I give both the item URL and blog posting URL so that you can read the original story as well as what I or another blog contributor had to say about it. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

* The boycott and cancellation of Elsevier journals continued and widened. Here's some news coverage of the new developments.

* I've added 28 new conferences to my conference page since the last issue. Tomorrow I'll delete the second asterisk marking them and the new entries will blend into the rest of the collection.http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/conf.htm

* Bloglet is down again. I've contacted the Bloglet maintainer but haven't heard back yet.

Because Bloglet has provided flaky service in the past, I'm looking for an alternative. Can any of you suggest a good blog-to-email or RSS-to-email service that I should investigate? I know about the Blogstreet RSS-to-email service, but I can't recommend it because it doesn't let users sign up under their own preferred email addresses. I welcome your thoughts and suggestions.

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